Search Results for: raid

With our workshop just off Copnor Road (PO2), we are the only Portsmouth Data Recovery Company, and have been recovering data for over 15 years. Portsmouth Data Recovery – 02392 671 330 Use our Portsmouth data recovery services to get your lost data back. Contact us as early as possible to discuss your disk problem. Even if you …

The Register reports that Hitachi have beaten Seagate to market with 1TB per platter drives. These will apparently pave the way for 4TB drives, however are currently limited to single platter options up to 1TB. I hope nobody tries to make a RAID 5 with a bunch of 4TB DRIVES. That would be asking for …

We have recently started to see a peak in the number of 500GB WD drives sent to us from Western Digital MyBook World edition NAS Servers. These NAS devices use two WD5000AAKS drives in a RAID configuration. The worrying thing for users is that even drives used in RAID 1 mirror mode are having problems, …

We have recently been trying out FreeNAS as a way to add some storage to our internal network. First impressions are positive. We are able to utilise an old spare low power PC to run the software from a compact flash card.

With their designer looks and an abundance of different interfaces, it is no surprise that they are so popular. There is however one main reason that people send us their drives, and that is because they are not working.

Meet the Team John– Company founder, Director and lead engineer. An extremely skilled cleanroom engineer even before starting Dataquest, and very knowledgeable about all hard drive data recovery. If you listen closely, you can still hear his distant Liverpool (actually Birkenhead) accent. Read John’s blog posts. Dan– Data recovery engineer since 2006 and Website Manager. RAID Data Recovery …

1. Stop using the drive. Any mechanical faults can be worsened by using a failing hard disk drive. See the results for yourself with these head crashes. 2. Do not remove any covers or parts. Removing the top cover of a drive will introduce dust, particles, fingerprints and other contamination if not removed in a …

Anyone that has ever looked inside one of these “drives” will realise that they are only suitable for temporary storage capacity. There is nothing magical inside the enclosures, just a couple of standard hard drives and a small RAID 0 controller. What people (ie. general users) tend to do with a drive of this capacity …

Important Links

Advice

Stop using the hard drive as soon as possible. If the problem is getting worse then you may eventually lose access completely.

Don't download ANYTHING to the disk. It could write over the files you're trying to recover.

Don't try to scan, repair or fix any errors unless you have backups of the data. A failed repair process can damage the files beyond recovery.

Don't re-install or restore the computer unless you have backups of the data already. It may get the machine running again, but only in a factory-fresh way. Your data will be lost.

If you manage to access your files at any point, make a copy to another drive as soon as you can. It may be a fluke, and could be the last time you see the files. Don't reboot expecting to see them again.

If the files you need are really important then you should consider getting the disk professionally recovered. We've spent years making our process as safe as possible to maximise our chances of success.

If you decide to try your own recovery, keep a close watch on the time estimates. If the time keeps incrementing up it could be a sign of disk trouble. Failure to deal with that could cause the drive to fail completely, and beyond repair. A hard drive shouldn't take longer than a few hours to extract.